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How are urban areas changing across the globe? How does rapid urbanization impact the local, regional, and global environment?
We live in an increasingly urbanized world, with more than half of the world's population living in cities, and nearly two billion additional people expected to inhabit urban areas by 2030. In a relatively short period of time, urbanization has also emerged as a top environmental issue facing all parts of the globe. Changes in urban areas impact climate, natural ecosystems, valuable agricultural lands and water resources, and directly affect human health and well-being.
At SAGE, we are working to understand how urban areas have transformed the landscape, the demographic, economic and policy changes responsible for rapid urbanization and urban sprawl, as well as the local- to global-scale environmental impacts that result. We work closely with collaborators from a range of disciplines and backgrounds, including colleagues in the UW departments of Geography, Urban and Regional Planning, Agronomy, Population Health Sciences, Rural Sociology, and the Center for Demography and Ecology, and collaborators at Georgia Tech, Yale, Boston University, McGill University, and Princeton. Current funding is provided by NASA's Land Cover-Land Use Change (LCLUC) Program and Interdisciplinary Science (IDS) Program, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
P.I.s
• Dr. Annemarie Schneider and her lab examine the causes and consequences of land cover change in urban and peri-urban environments, and the ways urban growth can be made more sustainable in the future.
• Dr. Tracey Holloway studies how alternative energy and land-use strategies could improve air quality and reduce carbon emissions associated with transportation and electricity generation.
• Dr. Chris Kucharik investigates connections between urban regions and local to regional climate through ecosystem modeling, remote sensing data, field observations, and long-term climate information.
• Dr. Jonathan Patz has worked extensively on the health effects of global climate change, and has new projects examining the 'co-benefits' of greenhouse gas mitigation policies. One major focus area is the 'built environment' (urban design) in relationship to transportation options and physical fitness.
Students & Post-Docs
Chaoyi Chang, Suzanne Gaulocher, Maggie Grabow, Kelly Logan, Marc Mayes, Zhiwei Ye
Ongoing Projects
The 40 cities project – Schneider and her students are examining similarities and differences in urban form and growth in a collection of 40 mid-sized cities (population < 5 mil) from different geographical settings and levels of economic development. The goal of this project is to associate land use patterns with a range of socioeconomic indicators to uncover the driving forces responsible for differential patterns of urban expansion.
Monitoring and modeling urbanization in China – Ongoing collaboration between Schneider, Kurt Paulsen (Department of Urban and Regional Planning) and Karen Seto (Yale) investigating current and future land use change in 15 urban and peri-urban regions in China. This project integrates satellite-based measures of urban expansion with detailed census data and policy variables in econometric models to determine the relative impact of rural-urban migration, rising incomes, infrastructure investment, and local land management and policy, and to predict future trends in urbanization and land use conversion.
Patterns of urban land use – Schneider is using very high resolution remotely sensed data (0.6-3 m) to develop efficient and generalizable methods for discriminating commercial, industrial and residential areas from one another within heterogenous urban environments.
PLUTO – Projecting the Impact of Land Use and Transportation on Future Air Quality. Ongoing collaboration between Holloway and Prof. Brian Stone (GA Tech) evaluating how "smart growth" strategies affect air quality on urban and regional scales. Funding from U.S. EPA.
Monitoring the global urban environment – Schneider collaborates with Professor Mark Friedl (Boston University) to develop and test a new global database of urban land cover characteristics (e.g. fractional amounts of built-up land, vegetation type and canopy coverage, and irrigation presence) by exploiting decision tree methods and remotely sensed observations from moderate to coarse resolution sensors. Funded by NASA's Earth Observing System Program.
Assessing the accuracy of global urban maps – How much of the planet is covered by urban land? Given the wide variety of data sets now attempting to depict urban areas, Schneider and graduate student David Potere (Princeton) are working to understand which maps correspond most closely to built areas on the ground, and to produce wise-use recommendations for different applications.
Monitoring the global impacts of urbanization on agricultural resources – In collaboration with Prof. Navin Ramankutty (McGill), Schneider investigates the impact of current and projected urban growth on agricultural lands at regional to global scales. To address how urban sprawl might affect our most agriculturally productive lands, this project integrates satellite image analysis, urban growth forecasting, field studies, and agricultural databases and census information to identify farmlands most vulnerable to urban expansion.
Environmental impacts of localized urban expansion – Kucharik, Schneider and grad student Kelly Logan are evaluating how urbanization directly impacts local climate and cropland net primary productivity using an agro-ecosystem model (Agro-IBIS) calibrated with agricultural inventory data, remotely sensed observations, and high resolution climate data.
Triple-Win Biking Project (Health in the 'Built Environment') – Patz and students evaluate health/fitness, air quality, and climate benefits associated with increased bicycle use in Madison, Wisconsin, as a model for developing healthy urban areas worldwide.
Understanding the demographic implications of climate change in urban/rural areas – Schneider and collaborator Katherine Curtis (Department of Rural Sociology, Center for Demography and Ecology) investigate the role of spatial variability in time-correlated climate and population projections across urban/rural areas. This project focuses specifically on connecting sea-level rise predictions along the U.S. coast to county-level projections of population size, age structure, racial and economic composition, and migration patterns in order to better understand the social, economic and political ramifications of climate change.
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SAGE is a Research Center of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
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